Jesse Pomeroy was a 12 year old boy living in Boston during the 1870's, who tortured and eventually murdered other children.. He spent 43 years in solitary confinement, eventually moved to a mental hospital . The book was very interesting,, Detailed Jesse's home life and the history of Boston at that time and the treatment of the mentally ill. ( )

Not too much to say except I echo the other readers who complained about this book being about everything except Jesse Pomeroy. Montillo seems to want to show her research into everything but him and we focus on the history of Boston, the Boston Great Fire, Herman freaking Melville, and honestly I think left a big question mark about whether Pomeroy was the person who murdered Katie Curran.

"The Wilderness of Ruin" is a true crime book focusing on the United States youngest serial killer, Jesse Pomeroy. Born in 1859, in Boston, the young boy had a deformity of the eye that causes a lot of people to think he was ill. Even his own father beat Pomeroy and it seems that Jesse's sexual compulsion to whip young boys sprung from his own beatings by his father.

Between 1871 and 1872 young boys around Boston were being led away by an older boy with a strange eye who would tie them up, hang them up, and proceed to beat, whip, and in some cases stab them. Montillo then leads us to how the police eventually figure out who the abductor is and what happens next.

Unfortunately Montilio then jumps around in the book (the first of many instances) and instead of us following Pomeroy, she goes into details on Boston itself, how the fire chief at the time, John Damrell, was concerned about how Boston would someday have a fire as bad as Chicago. And I think there was also another instance of getting into Herman Melville. I honestly forget at this point, but let's say a good 2/3 of this book had zero to do with Pomeroy.

The writing I found okay, but the flow was just terrible. I think if Montillo had kept the book focused on Pomeroy and his crimes that would have been better. The segues into other things as I mentioned above take away the main focus of this book.

The setting of the book goes from the 1850s to the 1932 and I thought how odd it was that Montillo doesn't get into how the Great War would have affected Jesse's family. We hear about how his older brother got married and had children and that was it. We find out about his mother, but his father is mentioned a handful of times and that's it. It was so strange how Jesse started to feel like an after thought to this book which seemed to be all about the things that happened in Boston in a 70 year time period. ( )

2.0 i guess?

The problem with this book is that there is not enough of a premise to support a book. The "hunt" for the boy torturer could probably fill a magazine feature (though to be worth reading, it would need to be better written than the material here), but it's not enough to fill a book. To take up the rest of the pages, the author tries, unconvincingly, to tie Jesse Pomeroy's story in with some information about what Oliver Wendall Holmes and Herman Melville were up to at around the same time. But it just doesn't work. These things aren't connected, no matter how much the writer tries to convince us that they are. I ended up frustrated by how loose the book was.

I think the writer was trying to emulate Devil in the White City, which is one of my favorite nonfiction books and probably my favorite true crime book. But through writing skills, exhaustive research, and a much tighter focus (on the creation of the Chicago World's Fair and H.H. Holmes), that book managed to be truly great. This one falls...far short of that. Not worth the read, imo, no matter how into true crime you are. ( )

This book appeared to follow the formula of The Devil in the White City, focusing on a city in 19th century through the lens of major events and a mass murderer operating in that city. In this case the city is Boston, the murderer is Jesse Pomeroy, and the event is the Great Fire of 1872. Except, that the book isn't really structured this way.

It is in fact more of a straightforward biography of Pomeroy, a teenage boy in Charlestown and then South Boston who tortured smaller children, and eventually began murdering them in the 1870s. He is sometimes called "America's First Serial Killer," although that is not factually true, but his crimes occurred in a period of growing moral panic about children's behavior (also not for the first or last time). Montillo documents Pomeroy's abusive family life, his gruesome crimes, his trial and public denunciation, and his long life in prison where he spent decades in solitary and made several escape attempts.

I'm not a fan of the true crime genre, so with the book so focused on Pomeroy it doesn't appeal to me as much as a general history of Boston at the time of Pomeroy's murders would. Montillo's attempts to link in other events are few and feel a bit forced and unrelated to the lifelong biography of the murderer. She does also focus greatly on the life and work of Herman Melville, who has a connection to Boston but had moved to New York prior to the Pomeroy murders. Montillo draws on themes of family dysfunction, mental illness, and monomania to draw Pomeroy and Melville together, but again the links feel strained rather than illuminating. ( )

I wish this had been better written. And that it hadn't felt so padded with other material. There's a story to be told here, but this book doesn't succeed in telling it.